A 377-Foot Waterfall, a Receding Glacier, and Nine Years of Change

The Nugget Falls Trail in Tongass National Forest delivers an extraordinary amount of Alaska in under two miles. Starting near the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center outside Juneau, the trail follows the shore of Mendenhall Lake through a stretch of southeast Alaska rainforest, opens onto wide views of the glacier across the water, and ends at the base of a 377-foot waterfall powered by meltwater from the Nugget Glacier high above. It is a hike where geology, climate, and pure scale come together in a way that even seasoned hikers find genuinely arresting.

The Nugget Falls Trail is one of several walking routes within the Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area. The Visitor Center, Photo Point Trail, and the Trail of Time all branch from the same parking area, making this a hub where a short hike to the falls can easily extend into a half-day of exploring the larger glacier landscape.

Getting to the Trailhead

The trailhead sits at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center, about 12 miles north of downtown Juneau on Glacier Spur Road. From the parking area, follow the paved walkway down toward the lakeshore. A signed junction directs hikers right toward the Nugget Falls Trail, which then traces the lakeshore east toward the falls. The Visitor Center itself is worth a stop before the hike — its exhibits on glacier dynamics and the Juneau Icefield add real depth to what you see on the trail.

Most visitors arrive by cruise ship to Juneau and reach the glacier by shore excursion, the Blue Bus glacier shuttle, taxi, or rental car. Renting a car from the cruise port is the most flexible option — it lets you set your own pace, linger at the falls, and add other nearby trails like Sheep Creek or Mendenhall Lake Loop without watching the clock. Rideshare apps are not reliably available at the Visitor Center, so plan your return transportation in advance.

Hiking the Trail

From the Visitor Center, a paved path descends toward Mendenhall Lake. After a short distance, the Nugget Falls Trail breaks right onto a wide, level gravel surface that hugs the north shore of the lake. The first views of the glacier open almost immediately — a wall of ice cradled between Mount McGinnis and Bullard Mountain, fronted by the milky blue water of the lake. On clear days, the scale is hard to take in all at once. The terminus appears smaller than expected because the surrounding mountains are so much larger than they look in photographs.

The trail itself winds through a classic stretch of southeast Alaska rainforest — Sitka spruce and western hemlock overhead, devil’s club and ferns at ground level, mossy boulders left behind by the retreating glacier. Wildlife sightings are common here. We have spotted a porcupine on this trail, and on the nearby Sheep Creek Trail we once watched a black bear sow with two cubs from a careful distance. The Tongass is the largest national forest in the country, and its biological richness is on full display along this corridor.

About a mile in, the trail emerges onto an open shoreline area near the base of the falls. The roar arrives before you can see the full plunge — a sound that builds steadily as you cross the last stretch of gravel and bedrock. From here, you can walk right up to the lakeshore directly opposite the falls, with the face of the Mendenhall Glacier filling the view to your left. The mist drifts across the water on still days. The deep glacier blue in the ice cliffs is something photographs never quite capture.

Highlights Along the Way

Mendenhall Glacier

The Mendenhall flows about 13 miles from the Juneau Icefield down to its terminus at Mendenhall Lake. Since the end of the Little Ice Age, the glacier has retreated more than two and a half miles, and the lake itself only formed in the 1930s as the ice pulled back from the basin. Recession has accelerated in recent decades. The glacier is now losing roughly 48 meters of length per year, and in November 2025 its terminus officially separated from Mendenhall Lake for the first time in modern recorded history. What you see today from the trail is a glacier in active retreat — a landscape changing on a human timescale.

Nugget Falls

Nugget Falls drops 377 feet down the side of Bullard Mountain in two distinct tiers — an upper drop of 99 feet and a lower drop of 278 feet. The water comes from Nugget Creek, fed by the Nugget Glacier, a smaller hanging glacier high in the mountainside east of Mendenhall Lake. Before the larger Mendenhall Glacier began its long retreat, the falls actually landed directly on the surface of the ice. Today the water lands in open lake water on a sandbar that simply did not exist a few decades ago — a small, vivid illustration of how much the surrounding landscape has changed.

The Tongass Rainforest Corridor

The wooded section of the trail is a short but immersive sample of the temperate rainforest that defines the Alaska panhandle. Look up for Sitka spruce towering above the path, down for thick moss carpets covering bedrock that the glacier polished within the last few centuries, and to either side for the dense understory of ferns and devil’s club. Wildlife is unpredictable but rewarding for those who slow down — porcupines, eagles, and the occasional black bear all use this corridor.

What Makes This Trail Special

Few trails in North America deliver a 377-foot waterfall, an active tidewater-style glacier, and a temperate rainforest in a single easy walk. Even fewer offer such a clear, visible record of a changing climate. We have hiked this trail three times — in 2016, 2019, and again in September 2025 — and each visit has shown the glacier further back from the lake than the last. Photographs from the same vantage points across those nine years tell the story plainly. The Nugget Falls Trail is not just a beautiful Alaska hike. It is a place where you can stand and watch a piece of the earth change in front of you.

A Glacier in Retreat

The Mendenhall Glacier has been retreating since the end of the Little Ice Age in the late 1700s, but the pace of that retreat has accelerated sharply in the last several decades. Researchers at the University of Alaska Southeast estimate that the glacier’s face withdrew the equivalent of eight football fields between 2007 and 2021 alone. The Juneau Icefield, which feeds the Mendenhall and dozens of other glaciers across southeast Alaska, has been losing volume at an increasing rate, with measurements between 2010 and 2020 indicating losses of nearly six cubic kilometers of ice per year icefield-wide.

The November 2025 separation of the glacier face from Mendenhall Lake marked a milestone that scientists had predicted as early as 2002 — the transition from a lake-calving glacier to a mountain glacier. For visitors who have been coming to the Mendenhall for years or decades, the change is unmistakable. We saw drifting icebergs in Mendenhall Lake on our first visit in 2016. Three years later, in 2019, the icebergs were gone and the ice face was visibly further back. By 2025, the gap between glacier and lake had become the dominant feature of the view. Each visit becomes its own data point in a story that the trail itself is helping to tell.

Tuesdays on the Trail Video

This trail guide pairs with our Tuesdays on the Trail video episode, where we walk the Nugget Falls Trail and reflect on three visits over nine years to one of the most quickly-changing landscapes in the National Forest System.

Final Thoughts

The Nugget Falls Trail does not ask much of its hikers. Two miles, flat terrain, an hour at most. What it gives back is one of the most concentrated experiences of Alaska you can find on a single short walk: rainforest, glacier, waterfall, mountain wall, and the unmistakable sense of standing in a landscape that is actively changing. We are heading back this August on another Alaska cruise to walk the trail for a fourth time. If you have the chance to come here, take it. If you have already been, come back. The Mendenhall is changing fast enough that what you see today will not be what is here a few years from now.

Helpful Links & Resources

• Tongass National Forest – USDA Forest Service Official Site
• Nugget Falls Trail – USDA Forest Service
• Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center – USDA Forest Service
• Nugget Falls Trail – AllTrails

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